Free Dear God by Josephine Falla

relieved at having done his duty.
    At that point, he realised he had put the piece of paper with the credit card address on it inside the brown envelope. Anger welled up again but there was absolutely no-one he could blame for the incident but himself. He calmed down with relief when he found he still had the empty envelope from the credit card company. Carefully, he copied the address. He wondered if one first class stamp would cover it. Probably not, he thought, they get you for everything these days. All he had to do now was buy the stamps tomorrow and send it off.
    He did wonder if they would be annoyed at getting their money in cash but the thought did not really trouble him. People were glad enough to get any money back, he reckoned; they weren’t going to say no.They should consider themselves lucky to have got it at all. With that thought still uppermost in his mind, he went to the kitchen to make himself a meal. Ginger came with him.
    He had another fry up of sorts, which was quite filling and satisfactory, and fed the cat, who seemed to like cooked sausage as much as raw. Remembering the laundry he wondered if any of it would have to be ironed. The bed linen could go straight onto the bed, no question. T-shirts – no, underwear – no – trousers? His old blue trousers that he had been wearing before the arrival of the cream, red-striped ones? Yes, perhaps they could do with a bit of smartening up, he reckoned. But that was all. He gathered up the sheets, pillow cases and, with what turned out to be a duvet cover, he set off upstairs. There he discovered the irritating difficulty inherent in putting a duvet cover onto a duvet; in the end he completely lost his temper and just laid the cover on top of it. ‘That’ll have to do,’ he told Ginger, who had come upstairs with him. But the room looked a little fresher and cleaner for his efforts. He wandered into the other bedroom, which didn’t contain anything much, just a few bits and pieces of furniture and a large rug. He looked out of the window. He looked down at his garden, which seemed to consist of unidentifiable rubbish, with an old, broken-down shed at the bottom, next to the gate which led out to the alley beyond.
    “Garden’s a disgrace, Ginger,” he said. “P’raps I’ll try to clear it up a bit.”
    He looked at Mrs. Brenner’s garden. That was a garden, a proper garden, with flowers and things. Already it was beginning to look a bit overgrown.The grass needed mowing, bushes needed cutting back, the hedge needed clipping. He remembered God’s instructions – TLC for Mrs. B. and he, William, had to start to ‘do something more’. It wasn’t something he would have chosen to do, he knew. What did he know about gardening? Anyway, he hadn’t got any gardening tools. But wait, there might be something in the near-derelict tumbledown old shed at the bottom of his own garden. He didn’t think that he’d ever been in it, actually. There could be something left by the previous tenant. He’d have a look tomorrow.
    With that thought he turned, went downstairs carefully, because of the cat, and set off for the pub.
    The pub was not a success that night. They were holding a quiz and he and Jimmy hadn’t got a team and no-one seemed to want them to help make up theirs.They shouted out whatever they thought was the correct answer whenever they could but it never was and they gave up after a while. ‘Quizzes,’ said Jimmy, “get in the way of intelligent conversation.’
    “Yes,” said William, mournfully. “They’re not interested in the right answers, anyway.”
    “No,” said Jimmy. “They just make ’em up.”
    As he made his unsteady way home that night, he began to be beset by unwanted thoughts. Why had he been thrown out of so many places? Twice he had been ejected from the big supermarket, once when he was, wrongfully and embarrassingly, accused of shoplifting and once again, when he was on his mobility scooter and had actual money